MSA - Everybody Dies

Summary
Everybody Dies is an interactive fiction piece that distorts our perceptions of reality and fiction through multiple conversations with and through the narrative's characters. The piece requires our interaction through limited questions and written commands, prompting us to explore and contrast the narrative’s sparse beginnings with the digital topography --a bridge, a neighborhood, and a store-- present in the story. The game's central mechanic is that we must die again and again in order to see the game's true ending: not dying.
Textual Elements
Piece opens with a text-based narrative introductory screen, before transitioning to a brief screen that recalls Craig Thompson’s Blankets:
You begin the piece as Graham, though multiple characters and narratives are encountered.

1. Graham
2. Ranni
3. Lisa
4. Patrick (we don't ever see through his eyes)
5. Tim (we don't ever see through his eyes)
   
   

A list of helpful prompts exists to help us navigate the game:

1. Help (provides detailed instructions)
2. Verbose (the game creates a detailed description of each setting instead of forcing us to remember where we have visited.
3. Inventory
   
   

Key commands prompt the story forward – you can ask for “Help,” but the interactivity mandates close-reading as key to unlocking the piece’s narrative.
Commands connect us to a sense of place – we have to be aware of both objects in the narrative along with spacial presence:

1. Commands such as “go north/east/west/south” reveal that the story’s first-person narrator has attachments and affinity to his locale.
2. These location-based directions dominate the narrative.

We can read the first-person narrative voice as an enigma, a dare for us to transcend the public world around these characters and move into the private persona.

1. Each short recollection affirms that narrators want to tell us their memories. We just have to know how to ask for them.
2. Graham – the first narrator – acknowledges us as “a voice in his head,” even going as far as to blame us for his actions:

Death is possible in the game, but the game doesn’t simply end – it places us in a place called “The Void.”

1. Once we navigate past The Void, we switch narrators.
2. Death isn’t continuous – we can move backwards in time after certain deaths.
3. The game "ends" when we've reset elements of the story that lead to two characters dying.
4. Heavily implied focus on religion and religious language.
5. Multiple developed characters
6. Suspenseful story-line
7. Non-linear narrative
8. Odd settings (riverbank, store bathroom, bridge)
   1. These repeated settings call to mind Bernstein’s thoughts as quoted by Ciccoricco (despite his focus on hypertext):
      1. “Recurrence‚ revisiting a place that one has seen before— was once seen as a sign of disorientation, inefficiency, or artistic affectation. As hypertext readers gained experience, however, they came to recognize that recurrence was the way readers perceive structure; if readers never revisit a node, it is difficult for them to imagine the structure of the hypertext or the nature of the paths they have not taken. Although some recent critics have attacked cycles as a symptom of postmodern malaise, it is clear that cycles are important in complex narrative” (49)
      2. For this story – reoccurrence is the bridge and the store, a place where our different tasks echo previous lives and perspectives.

Analysis
When Graham dies, he is reincarnated , and we see a glimpse of a fish (Graham) in the toilet which Ranni is cleaning

1. Renewal in the river, Sikh ideas of rebirth
2. We are perpetually stuck in Cost Cutters in this renewal
3. Now we play as Ranni the day before he is murdered, and Graham and Lisa are in his head. They help Ranni solve the puzzle of collecting carts.
4. Now we have a sense that we are banding together for a common goal - to live and to enact revenge on Patrick.

The puzzles are difficult in the sense that the right verbs need to be used in a particular order.
I was stuck in a perpetual purgatory of dying and reawakening in the same scenario for quite a long time.

1. I was about to give up and resign to dying or living a perpetual life in Cost Cutters
   
   

The name of the IF, Everybody Dies, is a misnomer if we play through and get Patrick fired by affixing his label onto Graham's locker.

1. Moments of real life mixed in with the urgency of saving lives.
2. I wish that the threads could be developed more. For instance:
   1. Does Ranni feel that his father is disappointed in him?
   2. Why is Graham still working at Cost Cutters?
   3. Why don't we get a more extreme ending for Patrick based on his behavior?
      
      

Questions
"The riddle helps to explain how figuration and a negotiation of understanding can take place in interactive fiction." (Montfort)

• This game, like others we have seen, gives the reader a false agency. It seems that you either choose the action that Munroe has scripted, or the characters leads you to it. Do you agree with Montfort's assessment of riddles facilitating understanding based on this IF work?
• Where does this work fall on the digital literature spectrum?
  • Again, it seems that the goal is to play through, rather than think about the situations and their significance.